Emerson Keenan
Co-Founder & CEO at Kali Healthcare
Dr Emerson Keenan is co-founder and CEO of Kali Healthcare, a Melbourne startup building an AI-powered wearable for remote fetal heart-rate monitoring, which he founded in 2020 with Professor Marimuthu Palaniswami and obstetrician Associate Professor Fiona Brownfoot. An electrical engineer by training, Keenan completed a PhD on wearable technology for pregnancy monitoring at the University of Melbourne, where he remains an honorary research fellow, and has published more than 35 peer-reviewed papers on pregnancy analytics. Kali Healthcare has closed a $1 million pre-seed round backed by the University of Melbourne and LaunchVic's Alice Anderson Fund. He discussed the company's approach to reimagining fetal monitoring on The New Script podcast with Frances Goh and Makenzie Thomas.
Key moments
Jump straight to the part of How Kali Healthcare is Reimagining Fetal Monitoring to Improve Pregnancy Outcomes you want.
- 2:45 Fiona and Emerson speak about their backgrounds
- 3:26 Origins of Kali Healthcare
- 6:00 How Kali Healthcare's electrical sensing wearable patch works
- 7:27 How clinicians are making use of the real-time insights
- 10:00 What makes Kali Healthcare’s wearable different to existing solutions
- 13:33 Breakthroughs they’ve experienced
- 16:00 Stepping into the founder role and the "ultimate rollercoaster"
- 20:02 Fundraising lessons: why it always takes longer than you think
- 21:09 Advice for other healthcare founders
Connections
Spot something wrong? Suggest a correction Updated 25 September 2026
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